Before the cabinet
Herb safety
Symbolic use is not a tea recipe. Toxic plants stay out of cups, lungs, and baths.
This page is not medical advice. It is a set of refusals. The cabinet will not teach you to drink wormwood, smoke mugwort, brew comfrey, or treat a heart with hawthorn. If you want a clinical question answered, ask a clinician and, in the United States, Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222 for acute exposures.
Rules
- If you cannot identify the plant, you do not ingest it or put it on your skin.
- Essential oils are not the same as leaves. They are concentrated and can burn, poison pets, and interact with bodies in ways a pinch of kitchen herb does not.
- Culinary use means food, in food amounts, from plants sold as food. It is not a cure.
- Pregnancy, nursing, children, pets, liver disease, and prescription drugs change the risk. We do not give doses.
- Smoke is a lung event. Birds and many pets are especially vulnerable. Skip smoke.
- Florist flowers are often sprayed. Do not eat them. Do not assume a ritual bundle is culinary.
- “Traditional use” includes traditions of poisoning. History is not a green light.
Entries that are symbolic only
Read the individual pages, and do not let this list make you casual about the others. Especially restricted in this library: wormwood, mugwort, senna, comfrey, holly, ivy, St. John’s wort, licorice root as a remedy, white willow and willow as pain treatment, nutmeg in ritual doses, aconite is not even in the cabinet and should never be added. Japanese knotweed is not to be planted.